How Do Different Forms of Vascular Brain Injury Relate to Cognition in a Memory Clinic Population: The TRACE-VCI Study

Abstract

Memory clinic patients frequently present with different forms of vascular brain injury due to different etiologies, often co-occurring with Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology. Objective: We studied how cognition was affected by different forms of vascular brain injury, possibly in interplay with AD pathology. Methods: We included 860 memory clinic patients with vascular brain injury on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), receiving a standardized evaluation including cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarker analyses (n=541). The cognitive profile of patients with different forms of vascular brain injury on MRI (moderate/severe white matter hyperintensities (WMH) (n=398), microbleeds (n=368), lacunar (n=188) and non-lacunar (n=96) infarct(s), macrobleeds (n=16)) was assessed by: 1) comparison of all these different forms of vascular brain injury with a reference group (patients with only mild WMH (n=205) without other forms of vascular brain injury), using linear regression analyses also stratified for CSF biomarker AD profile and 2) multivariate linear regression analysis. Results: The cognitive profile was remarkably similar across groups. Compared to the reference group effect sizes on all domains were <0.2 with narrow 95% confidence intervals, except for non-lacunar infarcts on information processing speed (age, sex, and education adjusted mean difference from reference group (β: - 0.26, p=0.05). Results were similar in the presence (n=300) or absence (n=241) of biomarker co-occurring AD pathology. In multivariate linear regression analysis, higher WMH burden was related to a slightly worse performance on attention and executive functioning (β: - 0.08, p=0.02) and working memory (β: - 0.08, p=0.04). Conclusion: Although different forms of vascular brain injury have different etiologies and different patterns of cerebral damage, they show a largely similar cognitive profile in memory clinic patients regardless of co-occurring AD pathology.